x, 322 pages : 24 cm

The contributors, including such leading scholars as Vicki L. Ruiz, Jennifer Scanlon, and Miriam Formanek-Brunell, examine myriad ways in which a variety of discourses and activities from popular girls' magazines and advertisements to babysitting and the Girl Scouts help form girls' experiences of what it means to be a girl, and later a woman, in our society. The essays address such topics as board games and the socialization of adolescent girls, dolls and political ideologies, Nancy Drew and the Filipina American experience, the queering of girls' detective fiction, and female juvenile delinquency to demonstrate how cultural discourses shape both the young and teenage girl in America. Although girls' culture has until now received comparatively little attention from scholars, this work confirms that understanding the culture of girls is essential to understanding how gender works in our society. Making a significant contribution to a long-neglected area of social and cultural inquiry, Delinquents and Debutantes will be of central interest to those in women's studies, American studies, history, literature, and cultural studies.--Publisher description

Includes bibliographical references and index

Making a Girl into a Scout: Americanizing Scouting for Girls / Laureen Tedesco. -- Rate Your Date: Young Women and the Commodification of Depression Era Courtship / Mary C. McComb . -- Truculent and Tractable: The Gendering of Babysitting in Postwar America / Miriam Formanek-Brunell. -- Female Juvenile Delinquency and the Problem of Sexual Authority in America, 1945-1965 / Rachel Devlin. -- Little Girls Bound: Costume and Coming of Age in the Sears Catalog 1906-1927 / Rhona Justice-Malloy. --"Teena Means Business": Teenage Girls' Culture and Seventeen Magazine, 1944-1950 / Kelly Schrum. --"Anti-Barbies": The American Girls Collection and Political Ideologies / Sherrie A. Inness. -- Boys-R-Us: Board Games and the Socialization of Young Adolescent Girls / Jennifer Scanlon. -- The Flapper and the Chaperone: Cultural Constructions of Identity and Heterosexual Politics among Adolescent Mexican American Women, 1920-1950 / Vicki L. Ruiz. -- Fictions of Assimilation: Nancy Drew, Cultural Imperialism, and the Filipina/American Experience / Melinda L. de Jesus. -- "No Place for a Girl Dick": Mabel Maney and the Queering of Girls' detective fiction / Julia D. Gardner. -- Can Anne Shirley Help "Revive Ophelia"? Listening to Girl Readers / Angela E. Hubler. -- Producing Girls: Rethinking the Study of Female Youth Culture / Mary Celeste Kearney

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